Opinion | US must ditch its Cold War containment obsession – China is not the Soviet Union
- Instead of understanding Beijing on its own terms, the basis for peaceful coexistence, US officials are talking up a new cold war and risking conflict
- Meanwhile, China must beware the dangers of stirring up nationalism, however righteous
For a quarter of a century now, I have taken his advice to heart. After all, Lee, anything but a communist, was strong-minded about world politics and well respected in the Washington and New York military-academic lobbies – as much as he was in Beijing’s.
He also said that Beijing’s “we’re back and we’re big time again” self-regard might well scare the living daylights out of people and would trigger a military balancing, whether Beijing liked it or not – which is exactly what has happened.
But at what point does balancing go overboard? A quarter of a century is not a massive stretch in terms of Chinese timekeeping, but by the tick of an American clock it seems a near eternity. Alas, right now, we are not where we should be: even with the comically one-dimensional Donald Trump gone, Washington seems stuck in the rhetorical rut of needing another old-style Cold War as a conceptual cushion to lean on.
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So, if you construe Communist China as the second coming of the former Soviet Union, then you’ve got a match made in American-exceptionalism heaven. But China is not that. Where do we see it invading countries, threatening to bury everyone in history’s ash and seriously threatening Western security?